The advancement of television techniques has reached a level of implementing a device for displaying stereoscopic images. Various stereoscopic image display schemes have been proposed, and at the time when the present application, full-fledged commercialization of a stereoscopic type 3D television is at hand. In a stereoscopic 3D system, two images are captured by using two image sensors, which are separated from each other by about 65 millimeters, similar to human eyes, and the captured images are transmitted as a broadcast signal to a receiver. Then, the receiver processes the two images to be input to left and right eyes of a viewer (i.e., a user), thereby simulating binocular disparity to allow for depth perception and stereoscopic vision.
In addition, active research is being conducted with respect to multi-view video, in which a plurality of images is captured through several cameras and the captured images are provided to a receiver such that 3D images of various views can be displayed on the receiver. Multi-view video is anticipated to give the advantages of providing three-dimensional (3D) image effects via a wide screen and viewpoint freedom.
However, in commercially implementing the multi-view video, the amount of instantly processed data is increased at the transmission side and the reception side, and high-priced equipment is required. In particular, in order to transmit images having different viewpoints, considerable bandwidth is required for a transmission process no matter how heavily signals are compressed by removing temporal redundancy and spatial redundancy. Although cable networks or satellite broadcast networks have been extended, a considerable number of receivers at the time of filing the present application will still receive television signals via the air interface, and coding a plurality of images and transmitting the coded images through a bandwidth allocated to respective broadcast channels for radio signals are not considered to be easy.
Such a problem may arise with a system transmitting two image signals for a stereoscopic 3D display besides the multi-view video.
Thus, a method for significantly reducing the amount of image signal information in transferring information regarding a plurality of image signals to a receiver to implement a stereoscopic 3D display or a multi-view video is urgently required.